5 Social Media Marketing Strategies We Can Learn from BuzzFeed

BuzzFeed may be the masters of social media marketing online. They aggregate content from thousands of different social networks, organize that content in a meaningful way, and then market it across multiple platforms so its generates the maximum number of possible hits.

Header photo courtesy of Buzzfeed.com

Want to get better at social media marketing? Be more like BuzzFeed. Here are some of the best strategies the online giant is using to grow its social media following every day:

5) Video Marketing Mastery

BuzzFeed is the king of making short, snappy, shareable videos. They make it look so easy that it’s hard to see exactly why they’re so good at it. However, here are some video marketing strategies they use:

-Using square videos shared on Facebook that look good on smartphones, tablets, and devices of all different sizes and resolutions

-Keeping videos short, with most videos lasting 30 seconds to 2 minutes

-Allowing the videos to be viewed without sound (or be totally silent), which means people don’t have to stop watching the video if they’re at work, school, etc.

4) Creating Multiple Accounts to Cater to Different Segments of their Audience

BuzzFeed is enormous, and this tip works best if you’re also a larger company that caters a wide demographic of customers.

What BuzzFeed does is create different accounts across all its social networks. This allows them to customize their feeds more carefully to their audience. So instead of a 25 year old working professional seeing pictures of cats in his feed all day, he can follow the BuzzFeed DIY section for lessons on how to improve his house.

Some of the BuzzFeed Facebook accounts include:

–BuzzFeed News

-BuzzFeed Food

-BuzzFeed Video

-BuzzFeed BFF

-BuzzFeed DIY

-BuzzFeed Animals

If you want to keep up with world events, you follow BuzzFeed News. If you want to see pictures of cute puppy dogs, then you can follow BuzzFeed Animals. Or of course, you can follow every account.

3) Focusing on Engagement and Interactions Instead of Traffic

One of the best BuzzFeed social media lessons can be learned by looking at their Instagram account. The BuzzFeed Instagram account doesn’t post calls of action back to their website. They don’t spam Instagram with snippets of articles you’ll read on BuzzFeed.

Instead, they fill Instagram with the stupid pictures and memes that people like to see when they’re scrolling through their Instagram feed.

In the short-term, this might not generate much traffic to BuzzFeed.com. However, it prompts engagement in the form of likes and follows, which ultimately sends more traffic to BuzzFeed.com.

One way to look at this is to consider your social media channels (or at least some of them) as “branding channels” instead of “conversion channels” – cheers to Moz for coming up with that distinction.

2) They Post Content Their Followers Enjoy, Not “Clever” Product Advertisements

We’ve all seen brands that post images like this:

The baseball season is starting. People are excited about baseball, so some genius social media manager decides to combine the worlds of Pepsi and baseball.

Here’s the thing: even the most hardcore fan who likes both baseball and Pepsi is not going to have much interaction with that picture. It’s just a commercial for the product and not a great social media post.

On the other hand, brands like BuzzFeed – and many others – are learning to create content their audience enjoys regardless of whether or not it explicitly promotes their product.

1) BuzzFeed Succeeds Because They Understand the Short Attention Span of Internet Users

Ultimately, BuzzFeed is one of the world’s best social media marketers because they understand just how short the attention span of an average internet user actually is. Instead of ignoring that short attention span, BuzzFeed embraces it and acknowledges it in virtually every piece of content produced by the website.

Very few people are going to watch a 30 minute lecture on YouTube. A lot of people are going to watch a visual-intensive recipe like this, however, when that recipe doesn’t require sound to absorb and takes under 2 minutes to complete.

To receive a free analysis of your company’s social media marketing strategies, and to learn where you can – and should – improve, talk to Renew Marketing today.